Canadian Science Fiction giant, Cory Doctorow, has put up a nice piece about why Apple and Sony suck. Rather than getting into boring techie talk, he very stealthily opines as a writer who longs for a DRM-less world, one where users can share, buy, borrow, and lend digital content as easily as they do non-digital content. As a content creator, his is a unique and important viewpoint that clashes directly with antiquated pro-Bono business models. Doctorow’s body of science fiction is captivatingly modern and so too are his finger-to-the-man opinions that hopefully, will help change the way digital books are circulated.

And that’s fine. Cory has a load of targets, corporate, and political, that he’ll chow on to further his ideology of bolts, screws, and wood instead of glue, metal and glass. While his books are preachy, at least they aren’t boring. In fact, Doctorow’s stuff got me back into Sci-Fi, and that’s a good thing.

His reasons for hating the iPad have everything to do with the fact that you need a spatula and a hairdryer to get inside. In a Doctorowian world, you should be able to tear apart an Elmo doll, hot wire a few circuits with your mum’s bathroom mirror and a stolen bin lid; voila! you’d have an iPad. Unfortunately, this world belongs to the corporate and the sleek.

I will not camouflage the process in which I discovered Cory Doctorow‘s books. Unfortunately, it was nothing so romantic as stealing into a used book shop and thumbing through bins of old books only to discover an interesting cover. eReader’s initial pre-App Store, Jailbreak-only release got me browsing its online shelves for good science fiction in late 2007 and early 2008 – that is where I discovered Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.